Lame duck GOP congressman speaks the truth

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) was defeated in the GOP primary race for the senate nomination, so he is in his last few months of being a congressman.   Whether this was an unguarded moment or an intentional what-the-hell, I-can-say-what-I-want-now moment, Kingston was quoted in the New York Times as saying this about whether President Obama needed to get congressional approval to increase the campaign against ISIS:

"A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later.’ It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long."

The sad thing is that I'll bet the majority of Republicans actually do have that attitude;  their actions would suggest that it's more like 90% of them.

What happened to the honorable tradition that politics stops at the water's edge?   That, when faced with an outside enemy, we become one body.  Even if we disagree, we gear up to do what has to be done, under one commander-in-chief. 

Perhaps we need to re-instate the draft.   No more wars where most people's families are not represented in those in harm's way.   Our army is a group we have hired to do our fighting.  So decisions about war do not so often have a personal consequence on the deciders.

Ralph

ADDED NOTE:    I later learned some context for the quote of Rep. Kingston.   He himself thinks Congress should debate and vote on this, and he would vote for it.   The quote above was not an expression of his feelings but rather the attitude he hears from some of his colleagues.